Important change in scam listings!
We have all seen fake postings on Gunbroker, scammers who have taken photos and descriptions from other sites and then created postings of guns that don't exist. But those scams were usually obvious because the accounts had ratings of NR (no rating). They were often flagged by GB with a yellow banner telling you to be on the lookout for duplicate postings on other sites. But in recent weeks I have caught 4 fraudulent postings from accounts in very good standing, with A+ ratings and many positive reviews. Usually I purchase the gun and look at the seller's contact information. Turns out the emails have been changed but not the phone numbers. I call the actual owners of the account and confirm that their accounts have been hacked. The worrisome part of this is that I suspect Gunbroker itself has been hacked rather than individual accounts. I suspect account information for sellers with good ratings is being sold on the dark web. If there has been a data breach it is important to protect your account! Change your password!
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I don’t think it’s a data breach. It’s just people who have been dormant….don’t check their account….and have weak passwords getting hacked. If your username and password are similar they will get in.
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Thank you Locust Fork. Yes, that seems reasonable. I don't seem to recall any fake postings with hacked accounts in the past. I have kind of an obsession with finding and foiling them. There is one account right now that is particularly bothersome. All three of his listings can be currently found on GunPost. I bought two of his listings to take them out of circulation until GB acts on my report. But somehow he was able to relist the fake guns and ban me from buying them again. Frustrating. The account that is hacked has an A+ rating with 198 ratings! I'm afraid reasonable people will feel comfortable buying from an account like that.
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If you see something message me and I'll send it up the chain....Gun Broker is really adimant about catching the bad guys. They want the website to be secure and they do have teams of people who are working to stay on top of the customer service tickets and monitoring to see if they can catch any fraud, but this is a BIG website and things happen so quickly that its hard to catch everything.
The scammers have nothing but time to waste....they'll plant themselves on a target and try to figure out how to breach things. If someone named Mark Smith creates an account with the username Marksmithsguns....and their email address is marksmithsguns@gmail....and their password is marksmithsguns1.....its a nightmare waiting to happen. Some people don't realize how easy it is to put the pieces together and access things.
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Thank you for the help and information Locust Fork! I am just now seeing your last message. The next morning after writing my post I noticed that one of the fake guns had been sold. I immediately added an addendum to the customer support message I'd send to GB about the sale and within an hour the account had been disabled. I'm guessing that the sale was cancelled before any money could be sent to the bad guys. Overall I'm pretty impressed with how quickly GB has responded to my notices of fraud. Each time they have acted quickly enough to prevent the transfer of money. I appreciate your analysis about the hack. I'm sure you are correct about the passive approach some people take when setting up their accounts making them sitting ducks for this kind of activity. Funny, since I bought two of the guns on the fake account my own information was available to the hackers. For the first time ever I got a text from Venmo saying I'd received payment from someone I don't know. A "smishing" scam. Since the GB scammer had my phone number I suspect it was him trying to get even. I toyed with him for a while and then declined his request for refund. It really made him angry. Oh well. Take care
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